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Online MPD… some thoughts on anonymity…

I responded to a post on The History Enthusiast‘s blog, dealing with her almost being "outed" as a blogger in class, which led her to write a rather lengthy reply post.

I started to write a comment in reply, but realized that mine had turned into a rather lengthy reply post as well, so here it is:

I struggle with some of the same issues, balancing the desire for privacy and a place to vent with my desire to make this blog as transparent as possible. I want privacy, and I want publicity– or at least I want hits. I want comments. I want readership and feedback.

My solution thus far has been to establish two (or more accurately, several) online "selves." One that’s pretty public and not too personal, and the other that’s small, secretive, much more personal, and highly screened. That latter "self" (on a friends-only LiveJournal account) is the one that only a handful of even my friends have access to, and that’s where my personal life, my joys and my angst tend to go. I keep that persona on a tight leash. I don’t connect it to other parts of my more public persona. It’s filtered, it’s under a pseudonym (or pseudonyms) that even my best friends wouldn’t necessarily guess was me.

My more public self is this blog, it’s my del.icio.us account, my flickr account. The places where I let myself be traceable, and try to control a bit more the content. And when it comes to this blog, it’s obviously less personal than the History Enthusiast’s blog, and more purely historical. And I’m sure it has less readership because of that. But I’m constantly thinking about how to strike a balance with that respect.

I think the real advantage of the "two selves principle" that I’m TRYING to make work is that it keeps me in the habit of blogging, either way. It keeps me writing and processing my life in that way, for things that won’t necessarily get turned in to anyone or published anywhere. And it also keeps me on my toes and hyper-conscious of my online profile. I make sure that my public face has a hundred times more Google Juice than my "private persona." It keeps me in the business of managing my online presence, which keeps me mindful, and (I hope) decreases the possibility of having one of those famous incidents where your internet slip is showing at the wrong time.

Personally, I’m doing this for several reasons. One is simply that I’m in a program where maintaining an internet presence is pretty much a requirement. Blogs and electronic journals and projects are some of the highest-profile things coming out of George Mason. So in one way, I’m just riding the wave here. But I also feel that there needs to be greater transparency in academia, and more immediacy.  Academics who blog openly promote these causes.

I think that this new publishing option– because that’s what blogging and the like are– is an exciting new development for academics. It’s almost like a conference that never stops, where there’s panels on any topic you can imagine. Of course there’s still a place for traditional publication and peer review, but this is an opportunity to share your work and get feedback among interested peers before all that– just like a conference, except you don’t have to wait all year to go, and you never get that 8am slot that nobody shows up for.

I’ve worried myself about the possibility of getting "scooped’ by over-sharing, as well, but honestly, I’ve been convinced by people who keep claiming that if anything, blogging increases your public presence, and gives you something to point to if somebody steals your research– you’ve already published it online. I don’t know of anyone who’s done this successfully, yet, but I DO know of several people who’ve been scooped after presenting at a conference. But we keep doing those.

I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out if this experiment is a good one or a foolhardy one in a several years, when I go on the market. But I’m hoping that even if there are some programs out there who won’t want someone who’s been blogging, there might be other programs out there who’ll like the idea of someone who’s been writing to be read– putting themselves out there– as much as possible.

Blogs are usually half-formed, often half-baked, and many are completely thoughtless and narcissistic. They’ve earned their bad name, as much as they’ve been maligned by self-appointed gatekeepers and culture guardians. But they have a lot of potential.

Academics, I feel, would be best served striving to achieve that potential, honestly and openly. When enough people do that, when there’s a critical mass, some of that bias will go away. But I feel that it’s important for people to be open about who they are. Blogging anonymously… there really is a similarity to the closet. You can either "come out," or you have to constantly fear being outed.

And look at Larry Craig… when you get outed after doing stuff in secret for a long, long time, you have a lot more difficult explaining to do.

That said, I intend to hold onto my secret "other personas" as long as possible, ’cause there’s certain parts of all our lives that we’d rather keep on the DL.

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Revision…

I’ve heard it said that writing is like giving birth to a child.
It’s painful, it seems to take forever, you’re likely to wish you’d
never started it about halfway through, and at the end of the process,
you’re left with something that, perfect or not, you’re completely
enamored of. If that’s the case, revision’s kind of like performing
brain surgery on your child. It’s really difficult, and you’re
constantly afraid that you’ll hurt it.

I certainly have that feeling whenever I revise a paper that’s less
than six months old—eventually I *can* gain distance from ‘em, but when
I’m revising something fairly recently written, like a paper for a
seminar—I’m far too attached to it, and I’m constantly second-guessing
myself. I feel clumsy, like every change is actually making things more
complicated and confusing. I have trouble not rewriting a phrase three
or four times. Often at least one of those times, it reverts to the
original.

I’ve been plowing through this thing, a couple times over. Other
than direct changes recommended by the professor, not too much is changing.
There’s tidying up, and some added bits, and some structural changes to
sections, but this isn’t the most radical rewrite.

The recommendation to follow was the elimination of my three
block-quotes. I really like block quotes—and I like a lot of them. I
always prefer to let the original voices speak for themselves, as much
as possible. While I know it’s necessary, my instincts seem to be
better satisfied with providing a minimum of interpretation and
explanations. I think part of me would be happier editing a volume of
selected primary source texts than actually writing a book.

The first and third block quote, honestly, weren’t too bad to weave
through a paragraph. There were parts of those quotes that could be
eliminated—or at least elided or paraphrased. The middle one,
though—I’m not sure it works.

It’s from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt, and it’s already edited
down—there were two ellipses in the block quote as it was. The rhetoric
is pretty lean and well-constructed, and the language mirrors the same
ideas I’ve already established into the paper—something that I feel
strengthens my argument. So not too much gets edited out. It ends up in
two quotation-loaded paragraphs.

I really feel like the parts of those paragraphs that are mine don’t
really add too much. It feels like when you get a used textbook and the
previous owner’s highlighted only the most obvious passages. I trust
the recommendation, ‘cause the other two didn’t need to be block
quotes, and I can see that now, but I didn’t until it was pointed out
to me. But it doesn’t feel effective.

Other than that—the introduction was easier to fix than I’d
thought—I knew it was too long before, and while the thesis now falls
in between pages two and three, that’s still better than when it was
toward the bottom of page three.

The conclusion, on the other hand, is still weaker than I’d like.
I’m no good with conclusions—I never found a satisfactory strategy for
dealing with them. I end up just restating my initial argument in a
more detailed way, and then do the verbal equivalent of creeping
backwards out of the room. I know the first part is the right strategy,
but the latter part—that’s sheer desperation. I try different
strategies for the final paragraph, but they all end up sounding like
I’m trailing off.

Otherwise, yeah. Just keeping it to basic stuff. Unnecessary shifts
in tense or person. Trying to avoid the passive voice. Making my
assertions stronger.

That part’s kind of counterintuitive. In American Studies, I feel
that a lot more emphasis is placed on agency and contingency and the
inevitable incompleteness of outside interpretation. You hedge your
bets. Even if you have evidence to support that someone did something
for a certain reason, it’s safer and more accurate to say he “seems to
have been doing it for this reason.” It’s about not speaking for your
subjects. In History, from what the professor has told me and what I’ve
noticed in our readings for this class, it’s seen as sufficient to say
that the guy did it for that reason. More of a voice of certainty and
authority. After two years in an American Studies program, that’ll be a
hard habit to break.

Overall, though, it’s almost finished, and I’m pretty sure that I have at least not made it any worse.

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Alternative Citations?

Someone sent me this link a couple weeks ago.

To be completely honest, I didn’t even realize it was a joke until the second entry.

The first one seemed completely commonsensical– of course you need a technique to cite graffiti. What if you’re working on a paper about, say, the use of Situationist graffiti in Paris in 1968. Or even a paper on contemporary graffiti– these things often get political or personal, they’re interesting and colorful, you could probably apply some of the same theories of anonymity and role-playing that people like Lisa Nakamura apply to the Internet. There’s some good papers there.

Only when I got to the method for properly citing a magic 8-ball or alien mind transmissions did I realize it was a joke. To be honest, I still like the idea of a citation format for graffiti or tattoos. I think they’re both things that one could find insight in. Maybe it’s just me, though.

But that experience got me to wonder about citations, and the role they play in our lives as students and academics. How much do we allow the people at the University of Chicago Press dictate what is or is not a valid object of academic work?

This is one of the challenges faced by anyone who does scholarly work on the Internet. The Chicago Manual of Style just has one catch-all category of "electronic source." When I was in college, I remember how excited the reference librarian got when he showed me the library’s first book that dealt with online citations.

Without an agreed-upon method of citing a source, the source itself is cast in a sort of shadow. If there’s no consensus about how to cite it, you open yourself up to battles between readers or editors about how to structure your citations that could leave your work in limbo while they thrust and perry. Some people are willing to take that chance, and they’re slowly starting to develop a consensus about certain questions of online citation, and opening up new questions… Should a blog post and an online newspaper really be cited the same way?

But there’s something deeper than all that going on here– how much do standards of citation unconsciously affect our decisions about what is or is not a valid object of scholarly research? It’s a difficult question to answer. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that standardized citation techniques do lend a certain amount of authority to certain types of texts. Might their absence do the opposite?

I was trolling around the Internet, and I couldn’t find much of anything on the history of standardized citation. Having done research that involved reading history books and literary criticism from the 1920s and earlier, I knew that the cult of MLA, APA, and Chicago (not to mention that radical Turabian splinter group) wasn’t always the monolith in academe it is today. In fact, back then, there seems to have been NO discipline-wide standardized citation technique.

Not that I’m saying that was a better situation– reading those sources can be a nightmare. It’s citation anarchy. If I had a dime for every time I encountered someone saying, "As Smith wrote in his diary," without clarifying who Smith was, whether his diary had ever been published, and if it hadn’t, where it could be accessed… well, I wouldn’t be a rich man, but I’d probably be a might happier. I would never advocate going back to those days, even if there are certain drawbacks to standardized citation as we know it today.

One thing I found that was interesting to me, however, was that (according to those all-knowing sages at wikipedia) the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style was published in 1906. This shocked me, because from my own personal observation, citation standardization didn’t really take off until the mid-century.

But then, I saw this: at the time, the title was  Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in
force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended
specimens of type in use. Rather than being a conscriptive standard set for all academics within a a certain set of disciplines, it was actually a guide to how to format things for the U of Chicago Press.

APA style first appeared as six pages of guidelines in The Psychological Bulletin in 1929, and the first edition of the manual was printed  in 1953. Similarly, somewhat later, the MLA first distributed a style sheet in 1951, and didn’t publish a manual until 1977. Obviously, the fifties were a time when the issue of standardization of style took on a new importance. I’d love to hear someone explain why. Also, it’s interesting that in all three cases, it really is the style itself that differs. The sorts of texts considered are fairly uniform. Is this perhaps a relic of fifties conservatism and fear of sticking out?

This is all rambling, and doesn’t really go anywhere. But I’d love to find more information and theories about how and why standardized citation came about when it did, and about when they were making the first decisions about what made the style-manual cut and what didn’t.

It’s all rather interesting to me.

If anyone reads this and has any books or articles to suggest, PLEASE comment.

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The dreaded passive voice…

So.  I just got called out in class today for using the passive voice in a blog post.

I just looked back at the blog post.  I’m frequently guilty of indulging my desire to fall into the passive voice, so I wasn’t surprised when the professor said that I had done so.  However: the specific example in the post in question brings up an issue that I’ve often had when people say to avoid the passive voice: aren’t there some times when it is necessary? 

I looked at the sentence, and it’s pretty much what I wanted to say:  "In January of 1917, a pamphlet was published…" The thing had about 15 signators, if memory and my quickly-scrawled notes serve me right.  I can’t rightly say who wrote it– surely the entire committee did not.  In my experience with writing by committee, one or several people write something, and the rest sign off.  Or offer revisions.  But I doubt all 15 people sat in a room, passing around the pen.  Moreover, again, I’m working on memory and notes here, but I don’t recall a publisher being listed anywhere. 

How could I put this into the active voice?  I can’t say, "Someone wrote a pamphlet," or "Some dude published this broadside," can I?  That sounds worse than the passive voice, to my ear.  I guess I could say, "a pamphlet appeared," but that sounds like some sort of mystical process.

I know that "The passive voice should be avoided," (har, har…) but it seems as if sometimes it’s the right stylistic decision.  How do you not resort to it when you’re faced with holes in the historical record?  It seems that sometimes there are documents that are too important to be thrown out just to avoid an "incorrect" voice…  The English Language has a passive voice for a reason– it avoids direct agency, which can be significant, even important, to do at times.  Sometimes it’s best to agree that "mistakes were made."

Can’t it be acceptable in Historical writing to utilize this voice’s capacity to elide certain gaps in information?

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